North
by orangeflavor
Summary: "'I…I don't know what's wrong with me anymore. And I don't know how to get right. I don't…know.' She finds that in her breathless release of half-panic half-rage, her hands have found themselves curled tight in his coat and her tears are hot along her lids, though unspent." - Shepard tries to find her way in the aftermath of Aratoht.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: Written for **halfslytherin**.

North

"' _I…I don't know what's wrong with me anymore. And I don't know how to get right. I don't…know.' She finds that in her breathless release of half-panic half-rage, her hands have found themselves curled tight in his coat and her tears are hot along her lids, though unspent."_ \- Shepard tries to find her way in the aftermath of Aratoht.

Shepard wakes in the Med-bay to the dimmed lights of the _Normandy_ 's night cycle. She blinks foggily, her limbs heavy and tongue fuzzy from the pain meds. She moans, and Thane answers.

"You are awake."

She blinks. Once. Twice. Again. She licks her chapped lips and turns her head to the sound of his smoke-lined voice. He sits beside her cot, hands held between his knees, eyes unblinking. "Thane," she croaks, managing a weak smile.

He offers a meager one in return. He doesn't reach for her.

Shepard has never been generous with her touch. It is a rare and tender thing when she offers it, and Thane has shown he has recognized it from the beginning. He has never initiated contact himself. He has always left the extent of their intimacy in her hands, from their first grasping of palms across a cold table-top, to the trembling brush of her lips against his, to the bracing warmth of her palm along his cheek that night before the Omega Four Relay. She explored his body that night, and he had let her, his own touch seeking out only what she had already willingly bared to him.

She wonders if this newfound intensity between them is perhaps because they are both overtaken by the wonder that something should not break beneath their palms.

Most things do. It seems the inescapable truth of their lives.

Shepard clears her throat and shifts beneath the blanket to sit up. "How long was I out?"

"Four hours," he says succinctly.

She nods, sounding her acknowledgment, before she looks around the Medbay. "Well then, I guess I still have a couple hours before Chakwas releases me."

Thane steeples his fingers together, elbows on his knees, and nods.

Shepard smirks at him then. "Want to help me escape early?" she whispers conspiratorially.

A soft chuckle falls from his lips and he shakes his head, a sad sheen to his eyes. "You should rest, siha. You will need it."

Her smile falters then, and she bunches the sheet in her grasp, swallowing tightly. She continues looking at him, and then softly, "When is Hackett docking?"

Thane's mouth dips into a slight frown. "The rendezvous is scheduled for 0600."

Shepard's eyes flit to the floor and she uncurls her fingers from the sheet, only to curl them tight once more. "And Aratoht?"

"Obliterated."

Her head snaps up at the immediate answer, mistaking his perpetual thoroughness and precision for insensitivity. She draws a deep breath through her nose, and then resolutely turns her gaze. "I guess I have a report to write then." She had known the minute she set the asteroid's course. Three hundred thousand. She had known.

'Obliterated' hardly covers it.

She fumbles at the end-table for her datapad and then stills, sighing with exhaustion, a sharp soreness tingeing her muscles. Her hand falls back to the bed but she keeps her eyes fixedly on the datapad. She rubs at her forehead with one hand.

Numbers blur before her eyes. Dates, times, fatalities. She wonders how it doesn't quite hurt like she expects. Maybe if it was Earth…

She inwardly scoffs at that. Because in some ways, this might be easier if that were it. Because then the crime would be clear and she could let herself cry and then she would never have to remember that desolate brown dirt and how it felt beneath her cheek for _years_ – because it would be gone. And everything would be _clearer_. She thinks maybe something is wrong with her that it doesn't hurt more. That she _needs_ it to be Earth to mean something.

That 'three hundred thousand' doesn't bleed her out like she thinks it should.

She has no face to hold to the number and maybe that isn't her failing but in the end that shouldn't matter.

Because maybe if it was Earth…

Growing up alone on the streets carves a new heart for you easily enough. It is a stoic, wary one, a cautious one – full of guarded regret and quiet desperation. You learn to carry close that which you hold dear when the room, the city, the _world_ is full of people who will steal it from you without a second's thought. Too many people. Too many hands.

She has learned to love the quiet, the distance, the stillness of solitude.

And so it _means_ something when she reaches for Thane.

It means something when she _wants_ the touch of another.

Her hand floats unsure in the air. She doesn't even realize that she is reaching for him until he moves from his seat across from her and settles in the stool beside her bed, his hand resting on the sheet beside her. Even now, he does not assume intimacy. He lets her come to him.

And she does.

Just the light brush of her fingers over his scaled hand. Hesitant. Unpracticed. He turns his hand over and offers his open palm to her. She stares at it a moment, and then her fingers are trailing over the coolness of his palm, before they retract. Her hand finds its home at her side again, clenched into a fist.

Thane does not relinquish his offer. It stays unfurled on the bed before her, patient.

They each know she will come to him in her own time. She always has.

"I apologize if I have been inconsiderate in my responses, siha."

She shakes her head, voice still rough in her throat. "No. No, you've been…honest."

He blinks at her, face an inscrutable mask.

She shrugs lightly, eyes trailing to the wall. "Which is what I've always asked of you."

There is silence a moment before he speaks. "What will you do?"

It seems a far more complex question than she thinks she's ready for. And so she shrugs again. "I suppose…there will be consequences."

He considers this a moment, eyes never leaving her face. "And so you would surrender yourself to the Alliance?"

Blowing a soft breath through her lips, still with eyes to the grey wall, she says, "If that's what Hackett orders."

He nods, musing, head cocked. "You assume retaliation."

"I assume…an accounting must be made."

He stares at her, still and silent. It unnerves her a bit, so that she shifts beneath her sheets and finally looks at him. Nothing in his gaze gives away his thoughts and her head is throbbing too much to think long on it. She blinks away the pain. "There are…rules, Thane."

Something flickers between them that she thinks she should recognize but the air stays dark and her lungs tight and she finds words again before she knows they're even on her tongue. "In war. There are rules in war, Thane. At least…" She turns her head at this pause, eyes landing familiarly along the wall once more. She has been staring at grey for just so long now. "At least with most civilized sentient beings of the galaxy." Her fingers bunch in the sheets once more and she realizes she _hates_ the scratchy cotton blend and always has.

The blanket never reaches from toes to chin and there is always some part of her left out in the cold.

Shepard swallows tightly and continues, the heel of her hand digging into her eye socket to try to rub some of the pain out.

Any of it, really.

Thane's hand slowly retracts from the bed and finds its home clasped with his other between his knees.

"We have rules, you know. Never the innocent. Never the – " She doesn't expect the break in her voice but it's there all the same. "Never the children." She scoffs, hand falling from her face to the blanket below. "Three hundred _thousand_. Just a number really. So easy to disassociate. I know the drill. I've been through the psych-evals. I've read the pamphlets. And the thing is, they're right. It really is that fuck-all easy. Just a goddamn number. But then – but then." She finally looks at him. "You know how many laborers were on that planet? How many of them had to be slaves? How many families of indentured servants? How many children? Do you know?"

His lips purse tight and his hands unfold and refold smoothly over themselves in what seems to her a half-conscious motion

She looks back to the grey. That same, senseless, barren wall stares back at her. "There are rules, and I broke them."

"It is a fallacy."

Her attention swerves so tightly at his words that she very nearly teeters off the edge of the bed when she whips her head his way.

He sits stoically along the stool, watching her intently.

"What?" It is a tight hiss of air that leaves her mouth.

He takes a breath that seems bigger than the room, than them, than the fragile space he has inside his lungs to hold it. And then words come. "War is unprejudiced. Its very nature is destructive, all-encompassing, unrestricted. It takes the able, the invalid, the wounded, the innocent. It takes them all – even the survivors. There can be no rules for such a thing. There can be no compromise."

She clamps her lips tight around her clenched jaw.

His eyes are soft when they flutter to her bunched fists. "To believe that such a thing is possible is…dangerous. And naïve."

"Someone must be held accountable."

Thane sighs. "You are a weapon, siha, in the truest sense of the word – and a most formidable one at that. But even you cannot hold back the tide."

She finds the anger rising easy in her chest. It has always been an easy thing for her. Always cool and welcomed. Always familiar.

Since she was seven and barefoot and motherless.

Since the hard-packed earth of home became an ever-present grime between her toes and underneath her fingernails and in the cracks of her heart that she shares with no one.

It never could wash out.

"That's not what this is," she breathes lowly.

His chin lifts at her voice, at the taut thread of caution pulled through her words. He is unmoved. "Then let me posit a question, if I may."

She nods, stiffly and mutely.

"Would you make the same choice again?"

She blinks at him.

"Knowing what you do, and knowing the cost, and knowing the stakes – would you take the same course of action? Would you kill three hundred thousand on the chance that it will save billions?"

Shepard thinks back to years ago. When her armor hardly knew a scuff and her rifle gleamed brilliantly and something that looked like normalcy loomed over her future, incandescent as a dream – disbelieving as she was of its presence.

She thinks back to the Blitz.

None of the vids can tell you what it was like to feel the slick warm blood between her fingers and to shut the door on those screams.

Some people are lost from the beginning. And she will never be able to change that. But the ones left? The ones standing terrified and breathless and rattling behind her? Waiting with still hearts and white knuckles for some kind of reassurance that _someone_ will come for them. Someone will see them home in the long dark night.

Those are the ones she can save.

She can bear the whispers in her dreams, because they will never be more than those she hears when she wakes.

"Yes," she finally answers. And she knows it's true.

Thane shifts in his seat, fingers unfurling and curling tight once more. It is a subtle, graceful shift that never fails to catch her eye.

The things his hands have done. The lives they've cut short, the prayers they've anchored, the body they've loved.

She knows – if she only looked hard enough – everything she'd ever need to know about the dark drell could be found in his hands.

"Then this surrender," he begins, voice purposeful and steady, "is merely lip service. Empty motions. There is no true penance in the act, because you cannot atone for that which you do not regret."

"Then what do you expect me to do?" It comes out more accusation than she means.

But he is unperturbed. He only smiles sadly at her. "Only what you must. I cannot offer clarity when my own past is so…marred. I fear I am not the moral compass you need me to be." His head dips then, in what looks like shame to Shepard, and the sight has her chest clenching unnaturally.

Biting her lip, Shepard scoots along the bed until she is closer to the other end, and then pats the space next to her. "Come here."

Thane looks up at her, blinking, one brow cocked.

She pats again, swallowing tightly. It scares her that she needs it so much. "Please." It is a strained whisper. She doesn't know if she will be able to ask again or if her heart – walled up and tentative as it is – will darken its door and turn him away before she can bear the intimacy.

But she is just so tired of being afraid. And so she offers this to him. And to herself as well.

Thane does not question further. Smoothly, he pulls back the sheet and slides in beside her, adjusting so that her head lies along his arm and he can wind his other arm around her waist when she curls into him.

"I just…" She stops, sighs, presses her forehead into his chest and breathes. And then it is all tumbling out in a hot, ragged breath across his skin, like crashing waves through the gale. "I can't stop. Not yet. Not when there's so much to do – because the Reapers _are_ coming and we're nowhere near prepared enough and I _can't_ fucking sit this one out on the sidelines waiting for some pretentious, self-serving, ignorant committee to dismiss my claims – _again_ – and take me out of the fight. I just…I _can't_. But if I don't submit to their ruling, if I don't come quietly I might…I might be out for good. I'll have no other resource to draw on. And I don't like it but I _need_ as many people behind me on this as I can get and if that means…if that means pretending to regret those three hundred thousand and playing the repentant murderer than so fucking be it. I'll play the part. I'll say the lines. I'll get their support one way or another and when this is all over, when the living outweigh the dead – and they will, they fucking _will_ because that's the only way that this works – then…then maybe I'll be ready to cry them out. Or maybe it won't matter by then because I'll be dead and wouldn't that be fitting? And… _fuck_ , it shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't…I shouldn't be able to see that kind of blood on my hands and be _okay_ with it. I…I don't know what's wrong with me anymore. And I don't know how to get right. I don't…know."

She finds that in her breathless release of half-panic half-rage, her hands have found themselves curled tight in his coat and her tears hot along her lids, though unspent. She steadies her gaze on the blaring white of her knuckles and the dark shadow over the bared strip of his green flesh. Her focus narrows to a pinprick, to the heavy lull of his breath and the way she imagines the air tight in his lungs, to the taut sinew and corded muscle of his throat when he swallows, to the gentle press of his fingertips along her spine and the slow circle his thumb makes along the small of her back.

He says he offers no clarity but she has never been more steady, more sure, more lucid, than when he holds her, when he presses his body to hers and anchors her through the raging waters.

He _is_ her clarity – her unmovable star.

He will always guide her north.

He is all the compass she needs.

And she can find her own morality by his light.

"It is not wrong, siha, only…unfortunate. In the end, you and I will always learn to live with our burdens. Always learn to bear the weight," he says. He braces his touch along her jaw and lifts her head slowly so that their gazes meet. "So long as I breathe, I promise, you will not carry it alone." He swallows thickly and she can hear the catch in his voice with the force of his caged emotion. "It is all I can offer, siha." And then something in his face shifts, and his brows angle sharply down and his eyes sheen with wetness and before she can catch her breath he is kissing her. One of her hands winds around his neck and presses closer to him, meeting his tender mouth with her own anguished one.

When they break apart a sob leaves her and she thinks maybe he isn't the one with bleeding lungs. "I don't want anything else, Thane. I don't…want anything else," she whispers into his skin, shaking her head. Her voice breaks and his fingers tighten in her hair.

"Whatever you choose, I am with you."

She nods her understanding. "I know."

"For as long as you need me."

She sobs again. "I think I'll always need you."

"Then sleep, and I shall be here when you wake."

She squeezes her eyes shut to his voice and releases a long, broken breath. Her lips are trembling and she can taste him still. Calming slowly, licking her lips, Shepard nods, head ducking beneath his chin and staying there, pressed to his chest where she can listen for his heart and remind herself that he still breathes.

And that she does, too.

Slowly, eventually, beneath the weight of old memories – beneath brown earth and bloodied knuckles and a starless sky but for one gleaming brilliance – she finds rest.

He is there to hold her through it, and when she wakes, though the world is no less dark and the air no less thin and the storm no less rough – he is still her guiding north.

She may yet find her way to shore.


End file.
